I’ll be doing a campaign/London update every Thursday from now on; hope you guys don’t mind!

New since last Thursday: I booked a hotel for my first week! April 28 to May 5, when I’ll be in London with my best friend. After that, I’m on my own. Scary!

Also new: I really want to do tons of videos for this campaign, because I think it’s the best way to let you get to know me and see how much I want this to work out. To start me off, I’m going to be doing Q&A videos over the next few weeks to answer any questions that might arise and let you in on my work and my process! You can submit questions via FB, Twitter, my blog, email, Instagram, or anywhere else you see me hang!

If I get enough of a response, the videos will be divided in:

Questions about photography

Questions about modeling

Questions about entrepreneurship

Questions about blogging

Questions about sewing

and Questions about moving!

plus a Misc Q&A if there are any questions that don’t fit any of the above categories — and various videos if any of the questions warrants a longer response (or if I want to wax poetic about something, too. That could happen).

1. I booked my flight to London. I get in at Stansted on April 28, 12:05. My friend Annemari gets in at 12:45. I’ll be alone for roughly forty minutes, which suits me beautifully. I haven’t got a set return date yet, but the earliest I’ll get is May 6, even though Annemari’s going back home on May 5, because the flights from London to Madrid on May 6 are far more expensive than the days following it. I’m very excited and not at all scared, except for the accommodation we’ve yet to secure and the campaign I’m launching tomorrow. At least I picked a crowdfunding platform, finally — thank you, GoFundMe, for actually sticking to your 5-minute reply policy and giving real answers instead of linking to FAQ pages I’ve already read. Customer support doesn’t have to be a fucking mess like it is on Indiegogo. Even Trevolta answered my questions when I tweeted at one of their founders.

2. Today I slept in until 7 PM. Please note that somewhere deep inside, I’m incredibly excited about a whole lot of things, including but not limited to the work I owe people — sewing and design work, work I positively enjoy doing. And yet there I was this morning, thinking, I’m not even tired, I should get up, and crawling back under the sheets. My cat joined me. We slept a long-ass time, together, him curled into a ball between my butt and my thigh, and me curled into a pretzel under my sheets. Good sleep. Bad brain. Excellent kitty.

Proof that I have sewing work to do and that I’m working on it.

3. Said furball also took a detour today to sit on top of my sister’s homework and facilitate my recovery of the tablet from under her claws. (I gave it to her hours before. At first she came into my room with the intention of just taking it, so I hid it under my sleeping form and told her not to do that again. If she wants to use the tablet, she needs to ask for it at a reasonable distance from wherever the tablet is, and I will hand it over. She did it straight away, like a bull, and then later on, properly, which is when I handed it to her.)

(Mom interference aside, I think it’s working to get her to treat me like a human being, even if she doesn’t understand why I’m bothered by the things I am. Whatever. Just do what I say is good for my mental health. It’s a perfectly good life choice, doing what someone says is good for their mental health just because they say so. It’s called “human decency.” That may sound like a very laughable Captain America concept if your lifelong MO has been along the lines of “fuck everyone,” but trust me, it’s a good one. It’s worth internalizing. Nearly everything that sounds laughably Captain America is. I’ll give you a pass on physically fighting back against bullies, though. You use your own judgment on that. Self-care is very important.)

Proof of furballiness.

4. I’m working on writing out my campaign reward system and pricing each reward. I’ll be offering pictures, prints, and shoots, mainly. If you’ve got any rewards in mind that you or someone you know would contribute to my campaign to get, give me a shout and I’ll add them for you. This is a collaborative experience, starting with the whole bit where I was set on talking to customer support before I launched a campaign at all. I may host a giveaway as well to promote the campaign, something like a mini blogger portrait session? I’ll also be offering a couple of group sessions as rewards, packages several bloggers can pitch in to get. I really hope you guys can help out in some way, even if just by promoting it! I’m getting a little… wait, next bullet point.

5. Expenses build up so quickly and terribly. You start thinking it’s just the flight and stay and eating, and then you remember the trains (which have gone up since the last time I went to Madrid on an Avant shuttle, the cheap non-bus option, by about 10€), the metro to get to the airport, the airport “supplement,” the ridiculously high prices for the tube even if you get an oyster card and a travelcard, which is what I’m planning on doing; the cabin suitcase I’ll have to buy, the fees for the campaign platform, and so on. Traveling with only a carryon is something I’m pretty set on doing, but it means I can’t take my tripod with me and, if I prolong my stay longer than a week, I’m going to be in a pickle as far as clothes to wear.

I was actually wondering if any brands might be interested in letting me borrow clothes and then either taking them back or shipping them to me in Spain so I don’t have to carry them back. I suppose if it’s worth it and the campaign goes well, I could buy a bigger suitcase and have it checked on my return. But I’m not particularly into that idea. There are reasons I want to travel light and the main one is I’m a weakling who hates dragging bulky things around. What this does mean is that I want to hit the PR angle pretty hard on my campaign pitch. Also, ask to borrow a tripod.

6. Also, my sister’s ophthalmologist recommended she get contacts instead of glasses because her nearsightedness is so high. Affordable contacts, anyone? 75€ per eye for six months does not count as affordable.

7. I really need to get my mom out of the flat. My father’s reaching new lows (or new highs, depending on how you look at it; let’s just say my mom’s been a shell on the verge of tears for the past week and a half, since he got his unemployment benefits that he wouldn’t have been accepted for if my mom hadn’t had to put up with all sorts of crap in order to convince him to apply) and I’m starting to think that regardless of where, I have to move out. Soon. Very soon. After London, maybe — just rent a flat here, which is much more affordable than there, and take my mom and sister and cat with me.

The main problem is I think going to a women’s center would help us immensely in locating an inexpensive flat to rent, but my mom absolutely refused when I ran that idea by her. She can go to a food bank, she can sleep on the couch every night, but she can’t ask for help — she can’t go up to someone and say, “My husband is abusive.”

It’s so impossibly disheartening.

8. I found the most gorgeous silk for the proto/modified version of the prom dress I have to sew that I’m making for myself and for practice. It’s teal and it’s rough (I always thought silk would feel more satiny, more like rayon, which I hate, but it’s not like that at all) and it’s not silk expensive, and I had them save three meters of it for me to go get it when I transferred some money to my mom’s bank account. Which got in today, which is why I booked my flight. And tomorrow she’s on getting the silk duty, because I’ve already lost two days going out. It kind of throws my days, or maybe my brain throws my days. Who knows. It kills my routine, is the thing, and I need a routine.

Is it gorg or what?

9. I haven’t tackled that visualization exercise yet, though. The one I did tackle yesterday was coming up with an ideal blogging calendar for 3-4 weeks. The takeaway is: I should put aside a day each month to shoot three or four outfits so I can maintain a semblance of fashion blogging without actually having to wear stuff other than jeans and t-shirts and hoodies at home; I should outsource any activism articles I write for my own wellbeing (and on that note, does anyone know any publications or sites that might be interested in running an article about poverty catch-22s?); and, to keep everything balanced both in terms of workload and in terms of content and to come off as the PR-friendly, for-profit blog this whole enterprise is, I should alternate tutorials and wordier posts with wishlists and pictures and product reviews with more personal posts that I can write easily, like 10 Things and Weekly Wishes and Cat Latelys.

I’m joining Bonnie for Travel Tuesday today! Bit of a spur of the moment post, but I went into one of my folders at random and my vague “maybe I’ll do Travel Tuesday” idea immediately became a fun, easy theme to write a post around.

These were all taken on or near Bevington Road in Oxford. And I’m feeling very “I wish I were there” about it all again.

For Travel Tuesday this week, I’m making a post that doubles as my Capture the Colour entry. I’m under no delusions that I’ll win — both because there are loads of amazing entries and because my travel photos are within the scope of where I’ve traveled as a traveller, i.e. Brighton, London and Oxford, and not Madrid, where I went to college for three months before I dropped out, or Amsterdam, where I only had a layover — but it sounded like a fun challenge, and I wanted to toss my hat in the ring. Plus, let’s be real, I enter giveaways where I have even less of a chance to win, and the prizes for Capture the Colour winners are awesome. The grand prize would allow me to make the move to the UK with my best friend I’ve been wanting so badly with a buffer for a couple months of rent while we find work and paying some of my mom’s bills. It would be amazing.

For today’s Travel Tuesday, I’m sharing shots taken from a window — again. Today’s batch comes from a single window: the one in the room I stayed in the first couple of weeks I was in Oxford. I was put up with a host family, and I spent the entire first weekend indoors because the airline lost my luggage and it didn’t occur to anyone to let me borrow some clothes while I waited for it. (In fact, the woman who lived there attempted to sell me a party tank top she’d bought as a gift for a relative. Welcoming. She also thought it was unhygienic to let me borrow a towel, so instead she gave me two tiny kitchen towels to dry off after I showered. Some of the many reasons I complained and got moved!)

Today’s post has a soundtrack: I got So Long, Marianne (originally by Leonard Cohen, this cover by John Cale and Suzanne Vega) stuck in my head while I was picking out pics.

It also turned out I underestimated my habit of taking pictures out of windows, so there’s going to be a part 2 next week featuring shots taken from static windows. This post? Is all shots taken from planes and buses. There may also be a part 3 featuring shots taken from a bus from Oxford to London and back, too, because I didn’t touch that folder. You’re welcome.

Linking up with Belinda and Bonnie for Travel Tuesday again! I’m still figuring out how I want to approach these posts — there’s a lot I want to share with you from my absolutely, ridiculously large collection of pictures from the three weeks I spent in Oxford, England years ago. Having these regular posts saves me from having to narrow it down, which I plain old suck at doing — if you’ve known me for any length of time, you know decision-making is the opposite of my thing — but I’m still torn between going for themes like “street signs” and “airports” and “suburbs” and “strangers’ children,” or places like the Botanic Garden and Christ Church College and the Marine Parade and this neighborhood or that street (see where it gets complicated?), or taking you on tours of my actual days, or some combination or all of the above.

I’m also not sure how many pictures I should include in a post, which doesn’t help any. What do y’all think? Kindly indulge my obsessive tendencies and give me some advice.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing something that fits all of the above categories: it’s a single place (Kidlington, a village outside Oxford, where I stayed with a host family for two weeks before the school I booked this with deigned to move me), a single walk around it (when I accidentally got on the wrong bus and got off a length from the aforementioned host family’s house), and it rather fits the suburbs theme I mentioned above.

Today’s Blogtember prompt asks: If you could take three months off from your current life and do anything in the world, what would you do?

The truth is, I don’t need three months off from my life. I’ve had several years off from it! I’m not tied up or weighed down by work, education, significant others, children or any sort of hometown love or pride. If I left, I’d miss my sister and my mom and my cat, but that’s about it. My problem is I can’t afford to fund most of what I’m going to do.

So here’s the question I’m going to answer: If money weren’t an issue, how would you change your life?

The answer is really easy: I would rent an apartment, jump on a plane, and move to the UK with my best friend.

Since I decided to participate in TravelTuesday, I’ve come up with about a dozen ideas for posts I could make. I’ve only been outside my country twice, three weeks in September 2007 in London and three weeks in July 2008 in Oxford (with one-day stops in Brighton and London). I didn’t buy my DSLR until May 2008, so my first time in London isn’t as thoroughly (ridiculously) documented in pictures as my time in Oxford and it only makes up one of those ideas… but I’ve chosen it as the one to start with. My reasoning for it is pretty simple: it’s September, I love London, and the fact that these photos were taken with a cheap point-and-shoot and aren’t as numerous as the 14 GB (no kidding) of fantastic-quality photos I have from July 2008 made it much simpler and a better option for easing into Travel Tuesday.

So this is how I got started in traveling and travel photography: alone in London on a scholarship with a cheap point-and-shoot. I fell in love, and I’ve wanted to live in England ever since.